MacPro 5,1 bizarre behavior and slowdown

you are running Dropbox, BackBlaze, and Parallels all at the same time. Any of those could cause the hangs reported in the diagnostics digest at the end, but the most crashes of all (17) seem to come from SnapScanManager. Lots of hangs, those could be caused by the File Sync-ers: Dropbox AND BackBlaze.

Best Practice for responsiveness while using non-Apple File Sync-ers is NOT to launch at login, but only when needed, and then quit immediately afterward. Otherwise they scan your files, non-stop, looking for items that may have changed. Because they are ported from that OTHER operating system, they ignore the MacOS File System Event Store, that could tell them in an instant what folders had been recently modified.

Your disk5 has several additional small partitions on the front. if you don't know what they are, consider re-initiaizing that drive some time.

<< Would an Etrecheck profile help? >>

yes, and it includes a digest of recent problems and panic reports at the end.

"On the cloud" is great for sharing photos, but is not a viable backup solution for everything you have. The stuff is not under your control, and is subject to sloppy handling, arbitrary changes in policy, theft, accidental deletion, data loss [are they making frequent backups using best practices?], and bankruptcy of the company that holds it. It can easily take three days to restore it at ordinary Internet speeds.

If you do not have a recent local, disk-based backup, your computer is like a ticking Time bomb. You are only one disk failure, one crazy software, or one "oops" away from losing EVERYTHING! Drives do not last forever. It is not a question of IF it will fail, only WHEN it will fail. In addition, you never know when crazy software or Pilot Error throws away far more than you intended.

If you are using another direct-to-disk backup method that you prefer, and you currently have a recent disk-based backup, that is great. If not, you should consider using Built-in Time Machine. Take steps to acquire an external drive as soon as possible. If you buy one, a drive 2 to 3 times or larger than your boot drive is preferable for long term trouble-free operation. Do not pay extra for a drive that is fast.  (You can get by for a while with a "found" smaller drive if necessary, but it will eventually become annoying).

Attach your external drive and use

System preferences > Time machine ...

... to turn on Time Machine and specify what drive to store your Backups on.  It may ask to initialize the new drive, and that is as expected.

Time machine works quietly and automatically in the background, without interrupting your regular work, and only saves the incremental changes (after the first full backup). Time machine backs up every connected drive that is in a Mac compatible format. it can not back up Windows format drives.

Time Machine's "claim to fame" is that it is the backup that gets done, because it does not ruin performance of the rest of the computer while doing its backup operations. You do not have to set aside a "Special Time" when you only do backups. When you need it, your Time machine Backup is much more likely to be there.

How to use Time Machine to Backup or Restore your Mac:

Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support

USB 2.0 can attain speeds of about 480 M bits/sec. That's about 48 M Bytes/sec, which is very comparable to the fastest steady-state speeds of most Rotating Magnetic drives, about 50 M Bytes/sec.

Rotating magnetic drives are mostly limited by the speed at which the data can spin under the read/write head, which depends on drive RPMs.

There are only a few remaining vendors left standing after the last round of consolidations. None of them make complete junk.

For me, I prefer a separate 0GB enclosure and a drive whose maker and specs are revealed ahead, then assemble it myself (four screws). You could also use a 'Toaster' style drive holder.

Carbon Copy Cloner:

• backups are bootable for your purposes.(in more recent MacOS and Apple-Silicon Macs, they can no longer be made bootable.)

• you have to schedule or set aside a time to do backups.

• your updated backup drive is as of last backup, ONLY, and does not go further back.

Time machine:

• Backup happens automatically at low priority in the background, as you continue to work. Does not ruin performance.

• no special time to do only backups.

• Time machine backups are actually a database of last-backup AND older complete state of your files as they were on any still-retained day's backup, as long as backup drive-space permits. (oldest backups are eventually eliminated.)

• Time machine App presents this display with the state of any folder today, and as it was, back, back back in time:

.

Based on your report, you have overflowed your physical RAM and are swapping onto the boot drive:

Virtual Memory Information:

Physical RAM: 32 GB

Free RAM: 22.44 GB

Used RAM: 7.74 GB

Cached files: 1.82 GB

Available RAM: 24.26 GB

Swap Used: 2 MB

a Restart will fix that for now.

that would be Microsoft Windows, the market dominator.